Lucretius was a Roman philosopher and poet of the first century BC whose only known work is The Nature of Things (c. 50 BC), a didactic poem in six books that expounds his philosophical beliefs. He followed Epicurean ideas, believing the world to be made up of tiny atoms moving in a void and viewing life in terms of pleasure or pain, representing good and bad. A profound exploration of man's relation to the earth, to the world and to the Gods, The Nature of Things was to have a huge influence on poets such as Virgil (whose Georgics was written only a generation later) and was to affect the course of western literature as a whole.